Round-Up

I have several things on my mind today. Rather than divide them up into posts over 2 or 3 weeks, I thought I'd write about them all.

Make It Your Sport


Many of us played sports at one time and still follow lots of sports. One way to connect training with our real lives and to keep our motivation up is to make training your sport. You could do training for local road races in cycling or running (not my recommendation) or you can just map out som e goals and measure your progress to reaching them.

Which leads to my next thought.

Measure


If you're going to train, measure everything you can so you can track progress. And write it down so you don't have to guess at what your weight was, your belt size was, or how many sets and rounds you did on this workout three months ago. When you see progress, you'll be more motivated to push further.

Set Real World Goals


Goals for time, weight, and distance are good. But also set some real-world goals. Like--I want to be able to be able to pull myself up into a tree with just my upper body (real-world use of pull-ups). Mine right now is "I will be able to comfortably carry my wife in a cradle hold while walking around for 1 minute." It's both specific and measurable (by the way, I can carry her around, but I want to be able to carry over 100 lbs around longer and more comfortably).

Progress Timeline


When I'm training someone, I have a timeline in my head for the progress that they will see (if they are consistent and have a reasonable diet).

• 3-4 weeks (I expect them to spontaneously tell me about how much better they feel.)
• 5-8 weeks (I expect to hear them excited about some noticeable weight or size difference that they are seeing)
• 6 months (I expect them to have lost at least 10% of their body weight--if they were carrying much extra weight--and to say "I never thought I could do or lose this much.")

Is there anything jumbling around in your head that your thinking about or learning? Share it here.